From universal basic income to public equity dividends
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Authors
Rankin, Keith
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2018-03-06
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Ngā Upoko Tukutuku (Māori subject headings)
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New Zealand
Public Equity Dividend
Universal Basic Income (UBI)
income tax
flat tax
tax reform
policy development
Public Equity Dividend
Universal Basic Income (UBI)
income tax
flat tax
tax reform
policy development
ANZSRC Field of Research Code (2020)
Citation
Rankin, K. (2018). From universal basic income to public equity dividends. Briefing Papers. Auckland, New Zealand: AUT University, Policy Observatory. http://briefingpapers.co.nz/from-universal-basic-income-to-public-equity-dividends/.
Abstract
In 1991 I wrote advocating ‘a universal tax credit available to every adult – the Universal Basic Income (UBI) – and a moderately high flat tax rate’. In 1996 I started to develop these ideas into a “social accounting framework”. It was only after my 1996 presentation – in Vienna, Austria – that the name ‘Universal Basic Income’ became a popular choice, among a number of other names, for the concept of a universal publicly sourced income payable equally to all citizens. In particular, the name ‘Universal Basic Income’ was popularised through the 2000 Boston Review forum A Basic Income for All by Philippe van Parijs, the leading intellectual in the 1990s of the Basic Income movement.
My principal academic output from this project was A New Fiscal Contract? Constructing a Universal Basic Income and a Social Wage, published in 1997 in the Social Policy Journal of New Zealand.
In his Boston Review leader, van Parijs suggested “that everyone should be paid a universal basic income (UBI), at a level sufficient for subsistence”. Thus he was advocating a UBI at a specified minimum level. Since then, the meaning of universal basic income has narrowed to mean ‘a universal credit available to every adult, at a level sufficient for subsistence’. It is this final qualifier that compromises the original meaning, and fosters the common criticisms that a UBI is necessarily expensive, and is an invitation to a lifestyle of indolence.
I now choose to de-emphasise the name Universal Basic Income; a name that, in the present debate, has come, to too many people, to represent an unaffordable utopian benefit that undermines the work-thrift ethos that they believe underpins economic growth. Indeed, in this context, a universal basic income is sometimes presented as a benefit to replace all other benefits – a maximum as well as a minimum benefit – meaning that people with unusually high needs may be denied public help in meeting those needs. Instead of universal basic income, I now advocate a public equity dividend. I have written a report for the Policy Observatory that details the idea of public equity, and provides a model for how, with minimal transition costs, it might work in New Zealand.
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Auckland University of Technology, Policy Observatory
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